Skip to content
Bodhastra
Your birth date

Date-only systems resolve immediately. Systems that require a birth time or place will say so instead of guessing.

Traditions to include

Choose one or several. With no choices, general browsing shows every tradition.

Your date and choices are saved only in this browser on this device. Clear all removes them.

The twelve sun signs, from Babylonian star lists through Ptolemy to the newspaper horoscope.

Western · sign 9 of 12 · natural 9th house

Sagittarius

22 November – 21 December, 2025

3 claims about Sagittarius can be traced to antiquity and are still made today. Everything else on this page arrived later, and each entry says when.

When Sagittarius actually begins

ingress 202522 November 2025, 01:35 UTC
ends21 December 2025, 15:03 UTC
boundary drift 1925–202521 November – 23 November (35.3 h)

Computed from the Sun’s true ecliptic longitude for this year, not read from a fixed table. If you were born within a day of either boundary, a site using a table may put you in a different sign — and it is the table that is wrong.

What survives from antiquity

These are the only claims on this page that may honestly be introduced with “tradition holds”. Each is attested by an ancient or early-modern source and by a contemporary one.

What arrived with the popularisers

Claims that reach us through Alan Leo, Raphael and Sepharial — the Edwardian writers who turned astrology into a mass-market genre — with no ancient source behind them. These are usually the most familiar things said about Sagittarius, and the page reference for each is below it.

What the tradition said and we stopped saying

Attested in antiquity, and repeated by no contemporary source in this corpus.

The fate the classical texts predicted

Firmicus Maternus and his contemporaries did not write character sketches. They predicted outcomes, and this is what they predicted for Sagittarius. Every one of these has been dropped — across the whole corpus, no modern source repeats a single one.

  • childlessnessJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.27.9
  • ruin and captivityJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.14.3
  • a violent deathJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.27.3

The work

Occupations are the one part of this tradition that demonstrably reaches the present. Character claims mostly do not, and physiognomy does not at all — but the trades the classical texts assigned to Sagittarius are still being assigned to it.

law — attested in antiquity and repeated today.

Rulership

The classical scheme gave every sign one of the seven visible planets. The outer planets were discovered between 1781 and 1930 and reassigned later, so where a sign has two rulers, both are real claims from different centuries. Neither is the correction of the other.

traditional

Jupiter

attested antiquity → present10 of 12 core sources

modern

none assigned

No outer planet was ever assigned to this sign. That is the answer, not a gap in the data.

Correspondences

Grouped by what kind of claim each is. Element and modality are agreed by every source in every century; the lucky numbers are agreed by almost nobody. Both appear on every astrology site in the same table, in the same type, which is how one borrows the other’s authority.

structural

Agreed by every source in every century.

element
  • fire
attested antiquity → present9 of 12 core sources
modality
  • mutable
first attested 19th c. · no ancient source6 of 12 core sources
polarity
  • masculine
antiquity only · no modern source5 of 12 core sources
sect
  • diurnal
17th c. only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

classical

Classical taxonomy. Largely dropped by modern astrology.

direction
  • east
17th c. only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

dignity

Classical doctrine. Stable, but the outer planets are a modern addition.

detriment
  • Mercury traditional
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources

mythic

The sign's image. Phrasings vary; the figure does not.

symbol
  • The Archer / Centaur
modern only · no pre-1929 source4 of 12 core sources
guardian deity
  • Diana
antiquity only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

body

Melothesia — the sign's part of the body. Ancient, and not medical.

body part
  • thighs
  • Hips
  • Thighs
first attested 19th c. · no ancient source4 of 12 core sources

accretion

Modern accretion. Sources rarely agree with each other.

stone
  • Topaz
  • Turquoise
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
metal
  • Tin
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
colour
  • Turquoise
  • Blue
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
flower
  • Carnation
  • hydrangea
  • peony
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
day
  • Thursday
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
number
  • 12
  • 21
  • 3
  • 7
  • 9
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
tarot card
  • Temperance
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 supporting source · none in the core panel

The body the old books describe

William Lilly, Raphael and Sepharial all told you what a Sagittarius looked like. Modern astrology dropped this entirely: across the whole corpus, not one physical description is repeated by a contemporary source. It is reproduced here as what those writers said, in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and for no other reason.

stature
tall 4middle 1
build
well-proportioned 5strong 2large-boned 1lean 1
hair colour
brown 4fair 2
hair volume
balding 1
eye colour
hazel 2blue 1
eyes
defective 1expressive 1
complexion
ruddy 2dark 1fair 1
face shape
long 3oval 2
forehead
high 1
nose
long 2aquiline 1
limbs
elegant 2strong 1
aspect
handsome 2open 1
previous Scorpioopposite Gemininext Capricorn

Bodhastra documents what astrological traditions have said, and when they started saying it. It is presented as cultural history and entertainment. Nothing here is medical, psychological, financial or predictive advice, and nothing here is a claim about what will happen to you.

Every source, listed

Place data from GeoNames, used under CC BY 4.0.